ask better than that, can you?"

MISS SPAULDING, turning to her music again: "Certainly not."

MISS REED: in a pathetic wail: "O Henrietta! do you abandon me
thus? Well, I will tell you, heartless girl! I've only kept it back
till now because it was so extremely mortifying to my pride as an
artist--as a student of oil. Will you hear me?"

MISS SPAULDING, beginning to play: "No."

MISS REED, with burlesque wildness: "You shall!" Miss Spaulding
involuntarily desists. "There was a moment--a fatal moment--when he
said he thought he ought to tell me that if I found oil amusing I
could go on; but that he didn't believe I should ever learn to use
it, and he couldn't let me take lessons from him with the expectation
that I should. There!"

MISS SPAULDING, with awful reproach: "And you call that less than
nothing? I've almost a mind never to speak to you again, Ethel. How
COULD you deceive me so?"

MISS REED: "Was it really deceiving? _I_ shouldn't call it so. And
I needed your sympathy so much, and I knew I shouldn't get it unless
you thought I was altogether in the right."

MISS SPAULDING: "You are altogether in the wrong! And it's YOU that
ought to apologize to HIM--on your bended knees. How COULD you offer
him money after that? I wonder at you, Ethel!"